Lost bustard breeds again - almost
26 July 2007
The return of the Great bustard is one of those conservation stories which has been making headlines for years. The great gamebird has been on the verge of re-establishment in England ever since the 1970s, so the news that a female has laid eggs in the wild on Salisbury Plain is part of a long-running saga. No chicks hatched because the eggs were infertile, probably because the available males were too young to breed successfully, but conservationists are delighted all the same.
David Waters, of the Great Bustard Group which has been bringing young birds from Russia, said: “It had been thought 2008 would be the first year that nesting activity would be seen and it is a tremendous boost to have this happening earlier. Although males were seen displaying to females this spring, it is understood that males have to be about five years old before they can breed.”
The last breeding attempts by native Great bustards in this country took place in the 1830s. The latest reintroductions are using birds from Russia which have been rescued from nests destroyed by cultivation or haymaking.
(The following piece about bustard reintroduction is from archive, ‘00)
Gerard Gorman, our birdwatching guide, pointed out two tiny pale spots on a distant ridge. “Bustards,” he said. “There used to be quite a few around here, but I’ve seen just two this winter.”
The birds were almost lost in the totally empty landscape of Moravia, with only a herd of roe deer running along the skyline to give a clue that this was Central Europe.
Two miles away on our right, a thin shelterbelt of beech trees stood against the biting wind from the East. Behind us, almost as far away, were the grey asbestos sheds and rusting machinery of a collective farm. Apart from that, the rolling plain of farmland was empty.
“It’s all a bit crowded for bustards these days,” said Gerard, scanning the bleak scene with his binoculars. “They don’t seem to like all the activity.”
To my eye, nothing seemed to be moving apart from the deer and the wind, but apparently the great bustard is sensitive.
Long horizons
I recalled that conversation on the Czech border when I saw the headline in a British newspaper the other day:”Great Bustard is on the way back”.
“Back to where?” is the obvious question. Does today’s England have anywhere with long enough horizons for the great bustard?
According to Paul Goriup, director of the Nature Conservation Bureau, who is behind the latest initiative to bring back the bustard, we have some of the largest areas of open grassland still to be found in Europe. Speaking from Odessa, in the Ukraine, where he is studying steppe wildlife, he told me:”Our military training grounds in Britain actually contain the largest blocks of contiguous grassland anywhere — Salisbury Plain, the Brecks, the chalkland Sites of Special Scientific Interest, the Downs — all of those places have dry grassland in really quite good condition.
“The reason that the bustard can’t come back is not so much that the landscapes aren’t there, but we need to fine tune the management. The particular problem for bustards is that we don’t have any overwintering green crops such as kale. Summer is no problem, but they need somewhere to shelter and feed in winter.”
According to the experts, the species colonised Britain once before and it can be encouraged to do so again. Many ornithologists believe that the great bustard first succeeded in establishing itself in this country in the 1300s as sheep farming cleared the forests from Downs and Wolds and as low-ground agriculture provided winter feed for the heavyweight, non-migratory birds.
First mentioned in writing in 1520, in Berwickshire, the species peaked in the early 1700s and was in steep decline a century later. Hunted with horse and greyhound, even shot over bait with the downland equivalent of a punt gun, the great bustard vanished as the farming landscape changed and open “waste” became enclosed fields. The last breeding droves of native bustards were found around Thetford, Swaffham and Westacre in East Anglia until the 1830s, although a few vagrants continued to arrive in England during Continental irruptions in the winters of 1870, 1880 and 1890, and there were even stragglers up to the 1970s.
The Hon.Aylmer Tryon, founder of London’s Tryon Gallery, specialising in wildlife art, set up the Great Bustard Trust in 1970 and imported Portuguese birds in an attempt to establish a breeding group in an enclosure at the germ-warfare research unit on Porton Down, Wiltshire. Captive breeding of great bustards over the past 50 years has been a tale of near misses and failures — only a couple of breeders in Germany have ever produced viable young — and the Trust’s stock gradually petered out.
The epitaph
Dr Nigel Collar, who worked with the birds for several years, told me:”The Trust gave me my first break in conservation, so I am eternally grateful, but the truth is that the project never got off the ground — it never did fly — and when the Trust was wound up last year following Aylmer Tryon’s death, I thought we were saying goodbye to the idea. There was only one surviving bird, which had been moved to Whipsnade.”
A local paper in Wiltshire pronounced:”Now, thanks to the ravages of 20th century life, pesticides and global warming with its cold springs, chilling the eggs in their exposed nests on the ground, the bird is no more and has gone the way of the dodo.”
This epitaph, with its interesting view of the chilly effects of global warming, was overtaken within a few days, when Paul Goriup, who heads up the Steppe and Grassland Bird Specialist Group of Birdlife International and the World Conservation Union (IUCN), announced an Action Plan to bring in large numbers of young bustards from Russia.
Nigel Collar says:”Paul’s dream is to create a corridor of natural grasslands from the steppes westward across Europe — a series of stepping stones, so that the bustards might eventually recolonise their previous breeding places, a rather lovely idea. It would be worth doing just for the sake of having some natural grasslands anyway, even if the bustards’ return by this route is unlikely.”
Paul Goriup says:”The collapse of collective farming in the Saratov region of Russia has actually increased the number of great bustards and we now have an opportunity to bring in 20-30 young birds to England each year over say 10 years, probably starting in 3-4 years’ time. These will be reared from eggs rescued from farming operations such as mowing and we shall be releasing them on grassland sites on Salisbury Plain.”
Great boost
Although some conservationists have been predicting the imminent demise of the great bustard, and it has retreated from most of Central Europe during this century, it has recently managed to make a slight comeback at the eastern and western limits of its range, on the steppes of Russia and Spain. Some estimates now put the Spanish population at nearly 20,000 and there have been calls for the EU’s hunting ban to be lifted in Extremadura.
Paul Goriup is working on the Pan-European Biological and Landscape Diversity Strategy, which has been developed by 54 countries from Iceland to Uzbekistan, and he says:”The bustard is perhaps the public relations part of this strategy. The reintroduction is not crucial either to the bustard or the grasslands in Britain, but it would certainly give a great boost to grassland conservation.
“There is no doubt that foxes will be a big problem, although there is the possibility of doing some fox control in the early stages. The birds we will bring back will certainly not be very predator-aware. The only way to deal with that is to plunge on and bring in enough birds and accept that there are going to be losses, up to 85 per cent. We need a more robust approach on the lines of the red kite reintroductions, bringing in a large number each year.
“The idea is to start with males, which are less of a drain on the wild population and which take longer to mature. The birds will be full winged when they are released.”
– Willy Newlands (copyright, from archive) (Photo of displaying male Great bustard by Anita Huszti, iStockphoto, copyright)
Footnote: The African Kori bustard is bred regularly at the Smithsonian National Zoo, Washington. Since the programme began in 1997, the zoo has bred 40 Kori bustards.
Houbara bustards, which are the preferred quarry of Arab princely falconers, have been bred in large numbers in captivity in Arabia; released birds are reported to be breeding in the wild, although recent information is sparse. The very similar MacQueen’s bustard, which is now regarded as a separate species, is found in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, wintering in Pakistan and Arabia, apparently overlapping with the breeding range of the houbara.
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